Village Contracts

Dochitha

Rangor said:

Having someone put an AI in an npc body would be awesome. Like when Microsoft made a Skype ai to learn from conversations and talk to people.

That or admins can pk for real. 

Accipiter

With the serverside curing system it can't be -that- hard to make a NPC that you can attack the same as a player, not that you would want to make it too common.

Austere

Accipiter said:

With the serverside curing system it can't be -that- hard to make a NPC that you can attack the same as a player, not that you would want to make it too common.

Iirc, denizens capable of reacting the way players do were requested after server-side was released, for pk practice, and it was deemed too difficult. 

Kiet

Nazihk said:

Kiet said:

Someone brought up a good idea earlier, in that you could 'pay off' your village infamy. I'm not sold on the village infamy part, but paying someone off to avoid getting contracts seems like a nice idea in general. It's an extra gold sink and lets the people who ABSOLUTELY can't stand PK (or the denizen assassins, w/e) never have to deal with it.

The problem with this is that lots of people generally bash to get gold, and if I have to use my bashing gold to pay off my village bounty, then wtf was the point of bashing? 

Honestly, I feel like it is impossible to properly address the  "villages feel like meaningless bashing zones instead of villages full of actual people" problem until they make enough non-sentient bashing areas to give people competitive options across the level ranges. 

Once there are enough competitive alternatives for areas like Qurnok/Moghedu/Arcadia/Istarion/etc, you can start adding penalties/dangers/etc for bashing villages. Without those alternatives in place, you can't really do that because bashing is too central to the game to mess around with it and add penalties for it for something as meaningless as trying to make people value Moghedu denizens as people after more than a decade of seeing them as a bashing area.

Ya that's probably true. Personally, I  bashed a lot of non-sentients as is (when I did bash, not that I love bashing much and most of my bashing was just 81-94), but obviously if everyone did it it would be a lot harder.

The ideal system, I'd say, is one where you have tons of bashing areas that are just animals, or like azdun, or villain types, etc. Then, you can have places like Tir, etc. give higher rewards (gold or xp-wise), but also penalties like we've discussed. The first part should probably be addressed first, though, like you said.

Sobriquet

Austere said:

Accipiter said:

With the serverside curing system it can't be -that- hard to make a NPC that you can attack the same as a player, not that you would want to make it too common.

Iirc, denizens capable of reacting the way players do were requested after server-side was released, for pk practice, and it was deemed too difficult. 

Go hit Lafrin and see what happens..

Antonius

Accipiter said:

With the serverside curing system it can't be -that- hard to make a NPC that you can attack the same as a player, not that you would want to make it too common.

I'd assume they'd have to - at the very least - modify denizen code so they support having the same afflictions as player characters (this could mean a complete rewrite of denizen code) and modify every ability in the game that doesn't currently work on denizens so that they do.

When it comes to coding, there's no guaranteed relationship between difficulty and time required, so even if it wasn't "that hard" it doesn't mean it would be something that you could do in a spare afternoon.

Solnir

Starmourn is apparently going to have more PVP like PVE. Can use affliction based attacks in PVE, for instance. Unsure how complicated it'll actually be, but that's proof of concept.

Asmodron

Solnir said:

Starmourn is apparently going to have more PVP like PVE. Can use affliction based attacks in PVE, for instance. Unsure how complicated it'll actually be, but that's proof of concept.

Midkemia also utilized such a system. You could use almost all of your abilities against mobs, including those that would afflict. It made for some interesting scenarios.

Antonius

Solnir said:

Starmourn is apparently going to have more PVP like PVE. Can use affliction based attacks in PVE, for instance. Unsure how complicated it'll actually be, but that's proof of concept.

Isn't Starmourn being built from the ground up as a new codebase? This is the kind of thing that's usually much easier to do if it's part of the design from the start, rather than trying to add it in 20+ years later.

Aralaya

Starmourn is a new code base yeah. (99% sure)

Antidas

Solnir said:

Starmourn is apparently going to have more PVP like PVE. Can use affliction based attacks in PVE, for instance. Unsure how complicated it'll actually be, but that's proof of concept.

For the record, admins specifically said that while you can do this, it won't be more efficient than just using a standard bashing attack the majority of the time. Which means that while you may be able to use those attacks on them, they may or may not actually react like a player would.

Solnir

Well. I'm only barely following SM, so sorry if I mislead anyone!

Accipiter

Antonius said:

Accipiter said:

With the serverside curing system it can't be -that- hard to make a NPC that you can attack the same as a player, not that you would want to make it too common.

I'd assume they'd have to - at the very least - modify denizen code so they support having the same afflictions as player characters (this could mean a complete rewrite of denizen code) and modify every ability in the game that doesn't currently work on denizens so that they do.

When it comes to coding, there's no guaranteed relationship between difficulty and time required, so even if it wasn't "that hard" it doesn't mean it would be something that you could do in a spare afternoon.

Create a new PC, give it a new race like immortals have, turn off a couple of flags that players have, set it to run from the same server as the rest of the clients and you essentially have a NPC you can afflict like a player. No need to touch the denizen code at all.

Kresslack

I think this would be great in regards to villages that have diplomatic ties to established organisations (i.e. city-states, Orders, high clans, etc). Instead of bounties being generated automatically, allow them to be posted by that organisation after someone has been charged with a relevant crime. For instance, I'm not sure if this already happens, but I assume a place such as Ashtan would be well within their domain to issue bounties against people slaughtering the inhabitants of either New Thera or Petra.